Appendix 1: Assessment of Prince George’s County’s Economic Drivers

In today’s globally based economy, industry clusters – a geographic concentration of related companies, organizations, and institutions organized around key localized assets – are driving regional employment and growth. Clusters have been found to increase productivity, stimulate and enable innovation, and facilitate commercialization. Increasingly, economic development efforts at the state, local, and federal level are focused on identifying and supporting local industry clusters. According to data from the Brookings Institution, the performance of core traded industry clusters is the “foundation of economic prosperity” and efforts to promote cluster-based development have become increasingly important among economic development practitioners.

In order the assess the future growth prospects of an industry cluster, the JFI-TEConomy Team uses as decision tree approach to assess cluster performance. This Prospects Rating is based on three criteria: 1) the relative concentration of the industry cluster – as measured by LQs; 2) the job generation for the industry cluster – as measured by employment growth; and 3) the relative growth of the primary industry cluster – as measured by the local growth compared to national growth. Based on these three measures (described individually in the analysis above), industries and clusters can be sorted into five industry/cluster typologies:

1. Current Strength – The cluster is specialized, growing, and outperforming the nation in growth;

2. Higher Priority Retention -- Cluster is highly specialized and growing nationally, but underperforming in the County; 3. Lower Priority Retention – Cluster is close to US in specialization and growing;

4. Emerging Strength – Cluster is growing and matching or outperforming the nation in growth but is not yet specialized; and

5. Prospects Limited -- Cluster is well below US specialization with declining growth or well below US growth.

The JFI-TEConomy Team identified twelve economic driver industry clusters for Prince George’s County. With total employment of 149,883, these clusters represent 47 percent of total County employment and cluster employment is growing more rapidly than total County employment. Table 6 describes the levels of employment for each of these 12 driving clusters as well as the industry/cluster typology for each.